Week by week, the furrows on the brow of Warren Gatland seem to deepen. You wonder if the Wales head coach might already be considering whether it was worth coming back at all. Called back to his kingdom with the promise of a handsome salary and the chance for a great restoration, just three months into his second tenure and Gatland wears the grim visage of a monarch returning home to find the castle in total ruin.
Yes, it’s been another of those weeks for the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), an organisation for which unedifying crises are becoming a stock-in-trade, after a fortnight of contract negotiations that threatened civil war. The Six Nations has been visited by plenty of ghouls during its long lineage, but this was an unprecedented threat of strike action that, until an eleventh-hour agreement on Wednesday evening, seemed to be creeping ever closer.
